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OpenAI has scheduled custom GPTs to stop running on 11 December 2026. Anyone who built one and treated it as a permanent asset is about to learn something the hard way.
The lesson is not really about custom GPTs. It is about where all of our work now lives.
Make a list of your rooms
Sit down and write out every place you keep something you would hate to lose.
A typical list looks something like this. Chat histories with prompts you refined over months. Canva designs. A custom GPT or two. Google Docs full of product ideas. Your email list, sitting on a platform. Your shop listings and their descriptions. Notes in an app.
Now look at that list and ask one question of each item. If this service closed tomorrow with thirty days notice, what would I lose?
For most people the honest answer is uncomfortable.
What is actually worth saving
Not everything deserves the effort. Three things do.
Instructions and prompts you tuned over time. The paragraph that finally made a tool produce the right kind of worksheet took you twenty attempts to get right. That paragraph is real work, and it lives in a text box on somebody else’s server.
Source files. Not the exported PDF, the thing it was made from. The Canva design, the original full size images, the document with the text in it. Exports are dead ends. Sources can be changed.
Your list of people. Email addresses of people who bought from you or subscribed. This is the single hardest thing to rebuild and the one most often left entirely inside one service.
The one rule that covers everything
If it only exists in one company’s product, it is not yours yet.
It becomes yours when a copy sits somewhere you control, in a format that opens without that company.
That is the whole principle. The rest is just doing it.
Start with the custom GPTs, because there is a date
Open each one you built. Copy the entire instructions box into a plain text file. Save any files you uploaded to it. Note which settings you turned on.
Ten minutes each. When the shutdown comes, you will have the thinking, which was always the valuable part.
Check the dates yourself: OpenAI’s custom GPT retirement FAQ. The timeline sits partway down the page. I wrote about what else it means in this post.
The prompt file everybody should keep
One plain text document. Call it what you like.
Every time you get a result you are pleased with, paste the request that produced it into that file with one line above it saying what it does. That is it.
Plain text, because it opens on any device in fifty years and belongs to no one. Not a note in an app. Not a chat you plan to scroll back to.
Within a few months this file becomes the most valuable thing you own, and it works in whichever AI tool exists next.
Export your email list on a schedule
Every email platform will export your subscribers as a spreadsheet. Nearly nobody does it until something goes wrong.
Accounts get suspended by mistake. Services get bought and shut down. Prices change beyond what you can pay.
First weekend of every month. Export. Save it somewhere with the date in the filename. Two minutes, and it is the difference between a bad week and losing the audience you spent years building.
Where the copies should live
Two places, and one of them should be a hard drive you can hold.
Cloud storage is convenient and it is still an account that can be locked. A cheap external drive that sits in a drawer is not subject to anyone’s policy decisions.
Keep folders boring and obvious. Year, then product name, then source and final. Your future self will be looking for something specific under time pressure and will not remember your clever system.
Thirty minutes on the first Saturday of the month
- Export the email list
- Download anything new from Canva as both an editable file and a flat one
- Copy the month’s good prompts into the text file
- Copy new product folders to the external drive
- Once a quarter, open a random backup and check it actually works
That last one matters more than it sounds. Plenty of people discover their backup was empty only at the moment they need it.
This is not about fear
Renting tools is fine. Nobody should build their own image generator or email service.
The point is knowing the difference between the tool and the work. The tool is rented and replaceable. The work is yours, and it should be sitting somewhere that stays yours when the rent goes up or the landlord sells the building.
December is a deadline for one product. Treat it as a reason to check all the others.
